From a technical perspective, perhaps. We’ll never know what technologies and standards were delayed or stillborn by MS’s monopoly (though in my programming windows books, they say that the 2000/XP codebase is natively Unicode, so I’m not sure what the truth is there).
My point was that the stability and commodification of hardware and software have led to greater penetration of the business and the consumer market, which ultimately has driven computers further in practical use.
The founder of Netscape wrote Mosaic.
More specifically, he caught on to the concept of software alone being a revenue stream. Before Microsoft came along, operating systems were seen as simply another component of a computer, one that was provided by the manufacturer (cf: Apple II, Atari, Commodore). Gates broke that paradigm; he didn’t care who you bought your computer from, as long as the OS came from him. That’s why destroying competing OSes (MDOS, DR-DOS, OS/2, and now Linux) has been one of the highest priorities at Microsoft – if Apple were to try and sell an OS for Intel-based architectures, Microsoft would be on them like a ton of bricks.
That’s only a side effect of having a monopoly, and bears no relationship to true compatability, which involves creating open, non-proprietary standards for everyone to use.
Gee, and here I thought it was because it had the right combination of capacity, size, and ease-of-use. :rolleyes: After all, the iPod was already a success (in terms of units sold and revenue) before Apple made it Windows-compatable. Making the iPod work with Windows merely increased the volume of units sold; it didn’t turn a little-known product into an overnight success.
One thing I can blame MS for is buying Softimage, and then not putting it on the fast-track towards a NT port. Today, you have Maya upto 5.0 and XSI upto 3.0. In fact, XSI didn’t even have a fully-featured modeling toolkit till 1.5, so Softimage|3D had to be bundled for free with XSI. Luckily, then Avid bought the company off MS in 1998.
I can be sarcastic, too.
I guess all of the MP3 listeners in the world fall within the same 5 percent market share that Apple has. Let’s see. I have to market my product in order to sell a lot of them. Am I going to market it to 5 percent of the market, or 95 percent of the market?
:rolleyes:
Stability? Com’on, How many times Windows 95 crash a day on the average?
My POV is that, without MS, businesses would still computerise as a way to increase productivity.
Sorry, I was unclear: by “stability”, I meant market stability, not computer stability. From the time of the clone wars on, businesses could be relatively confident that there was a wide selection of more-or-less interchangeable hardware that would all work together. Microsoft provided the software side of that equation–it didn’t work great, but it worked, and everyone else had it.
Sure, businesses would have computerized–but not to the degree that they have now. Not to the point where just about every company has a computer on every desk, and companies are totally dependent upon email and internet access.